Homeros: Oud Royale

No single person composed this perfume.

In the spring of 2020, I was stranded on the southern Antalyan coast, a sea away from my atelier, staring at the exact stretch of Mediterranean – that coastline, orange groves on the hills and narcissus on the breeze and the salt-cool of the Aegean coming off the water – I wanted to bottle but was unable to lay a hand on a single aromatic that might do it.

Lockdown left me one option: to make it by proxy.

That became The Odyssey Collab – not a focus group but a committed private membership. Each member worked from an Odyssey guide and five contenders – Ithaca, Zante, Ogygia, Cythera, Achaea – wearing and judging every version in my place, then trading verdicts with me privately, across a shuttered planet. Tweak by tweak, through other people’s hands and other people’s noses, a perfume took shape that none of us – its supposed author included – had seen coming.

It was a great experience to challenge the hardest-to-please fragheads I know. This was a crowd that could pick out the tonka in Zante and the sliver of musk inside Ithaca and in none of the others; who flagged that there was no ambergris anywhere in the composition – there wasn’t, and now there’s plenty; who worked out that it was the apricot quietly killing the mandarin, because it was. Homeros belongs as much to them as to me – to Andy for his scathing eye, to Erhard for his avant-garde proposals, to Walter, who talked me into the petrichor-green incense of Papuan oud, and to Eugenie, who claims direct descent from Homer himself.

All these years later, I opened those emails again. The Odyssey Collab was over, but the perfumer who read them wasn’t the same one who had written them. I kept everything the Collab had fought for, and developed it as far as all I’d learned since convinced me it could go.

Spray it, and the voyage begins…

The morning comes off the water first: red mandarin and bergamot flung across your skin like sun on open sea, a raw knuckle of ginger cutting the light sharp enough to sail into. And oud.

An island tries to keep you: tuberose opening its throat, blackcurrant bleeding resin, a narcotic green breath of betel leaf that begs you to drop anchor and stay. Inland the light turns gold – lavender and saffron off the hot hills, osmanthus glowing apricot, almost the exact color of an afternoon that doesn’t want to end. And more oud.

Under it all runs the sea itself… nearly every perfume on earth is dissolved in plain alcohol; Homeros floats on a fortune of vanishing aromatics – musk, ambergris, and a 70s Mysore tincture that’s been steeping for five years.

The Ithaca Accord

This edition has also been enhanced with a full three grams of our Ithaca accord, which includes a trio of vintage ouds most collectors would ration by the swipe.

Down the hull: salt driven into cypress, cedar and oak until the timber groans. The Ithaca Accord soaks that wood in incense and lets it darken. Tigerwood 1991 already belongs in this world – wild West-Malaysian agarwood, black-striped like its namesake, distilled thirty-five years ago and matured into dense, creamy incense, a green camphoric pitch rising through a red-musk heart, sweet as a chip laid on the coal. It doesn’t turn the perfume purple; it makes the wooden vessel older, darker, resin-soaked – the timbers of a ship long at sea.

Around it, Oud Royale (1982), which came, fittingly for a story of kings, from a sultan’s own rotation – dry and kinamic, oozing incense off a resin so cold it numbs the tongue. And Mélange Royale, a dark, jammy vintage Taifi rose sinking into vintage Myitkyina agarwood.

None of it can be made again – the trees are gone, the harvests history. Half a century of maturation is something no amount of money can recreate. Three grams is enough to change everything below the waterline: up top the salt and citrus still break bright, but beneath them the ship itself has gone dark, the hull soaked in oud incense and old-school resin.

The Odyssey was never about travel, but about a man stranded far from home, improvising his way back through everyone he met. Homeros could only have been made in one strange season, by one improbable group of people, under circumstances that now seem almost mythical. Now it returns at its highest concentration ever, enriched with the world’s most precious ouds – distillations I simply wouldn’t have committed to a perfume back then.

Composition: Oud Royale · Mélange Royale · Tigerwood 1991 · Musk Motia · Persian Rose · Orange Blossom · Osmanthus · Elderflower · Neroli · Hinoki · Blue Cypress · Civet · Khmer Musk (Tibetan musk steeped in wild Cambodian oud) · Indian Sandalwood · Maroke Agarwood · Bourbon Vanilla · Patchouli Musk (Tibetan musk steeped in patchouli) · Tolu Balsam · Oakmoss · Tobacco · Cacao

Carrier: 70s Mysore Sandalwood · Borneo Oud Resin · SQ Ambergris · Tonkin Musk

*Features the original Habib Dingle leather (full-grain Italian calf hide) pouch with an accompanying terracotta stone cap.